The Oscars 2013: Soft Power and Seth MacFarlane

“I’m not an Oscar host, but I play one on TV.” The peculiarity of selecting Seth MacFarlane—in effect, the country’s leading voice-over artist, but a mere beginner at in-person performance—as the host of the Oscars was evident from the start: he seemed as if he were doing an “S.N.L.” parody of an Oscar host, delivering lines that resembled Oscar-host gags that exaggerate the worst emcee stereotypes (mainly, regressive, Archie-Bunker-ish attitudes) and faking the outward tone of chipper salesmanship while never conveying authentic joie de shtick.

If only it were an elaborate put-on—if only Stephen Colbert had been tapped to host. But his ironies might have hit where it hurts: Hollywood’s self-importance. And this year’s Oscars were nothing if not self-important. MacFarlane may have been struggling to play his part, but he looked quite satisfied doing so, and the overconfident simulacrum was the principal aesthetic mode of the movies that the Academy chose to smile on this year. The movies that were made seemed influenced by the 2012 electoral campaign, and the Oscar nominations seemed like a continuation of the campaign.

The Hollywood spotlight may not exactly be the place for shrinking violets, but this year’s batch of Best Picture nominees is marked by the swagger with which they depict, affirm, assert, represent. There’s no self-questioning; no hesitation about the aesthetic or ontological status of the filming of history or of violence; no doubt about the uninhibited access to film any subject at will; no suggestion that there’s any particular personal standpoint that defines the perspective and that is itself apt to be reflected in the film; no worry about whether something is too violent or too repellent or too intimate or simply too uncertain to film with the hard-edged stamp of unchallenged veracity. None of these nine films contains or implies the question of how or even why they’re filmed as they are. They all have tension-free representational positiveness, with all negative charges suppressed in advance.

Every one is a message film, every one comes packed with its op-ed moralizing or its didactic ambiguity neatly wrapped in its shadow-free cinematic prose or jingling and sentimental poetry. And, though I’m a great admirer of the First Lady, I found Michelle Obama’s appearance to open the Best Picture envelope, accompanied by the gold-braided honor guard behind her, wildly inappropriate in its affirmation of the hard power behind the soft power—the connection of real politics to the representational politics of the movies, of the peculiar and long-standing symbiosis of Washington and Hollywood—all the more so when the matter of access to inside-government information is a key issue with the making of “Zero Dark Thirty.”

So the movies offered patriotic lore and other sorts of issue-oriented advocacy, from the mental-health self-help support group of “Silver Linings Playbook” to the wan religious syncretism of “Life of Pi”—which is why the ceremony’s far-too-many overblown, overlong, overloud production numbers suddenly make sense. As I watched the broadcast, I was bewildered by the seemingly oblivious indulgence in mind-numbing pageantry—but, in retrospect, I see it as a way (likely unconsciously motivated) of throwing up a screen of razzle-dazzle that distracts from the ideological hard core and makes the point of the evening appear to be nothing more than splashy, even raucous, entertainment. Which isn’t to detract from the onstage artistry itself that was served up along the way—the highlights of which, for me, were the full-throated, charismatic return of Shirley Bassey to sing “Goldfinger” and Adele’s impassioned yet restrained delivery of “Skyfall.”

Did the producers give pride of place in the onstage performances to women in the hope that their work would dispel the rank odor of sexism that some of MacFarlane’s humor gave off? The gross miscalculation of the “boobs” number set the tone for the evening—the wrong one. It seemed as if MacFarlane wanted to announce his hiring of Mr. Skin as a musical consultant. I’ve long thought that the nudity of women in movies has often been used by producers as a sort of ugly rite of passage, a public refraction of the casting couch—but, rather than lampooning the industry potentates who pay for it and market it or, for that matter, the male voyeurism that they serve or the societal sexism that underlies the practice, MacFarlane seemed to be mocking and embarrassing the actresses themselves.

In late December, I contributed a few lines to The Morning News on the year’s most and least important events. In the midst of the year-end Oscar-season hype, anticipating the new set of awards even more than looking back at the last one, I kvetched that the least important event was “the Oscars, which function in a giddy parallel fantasy world of cinematic values.” I didn’t suspect how right this hyperbole would prove. Even as movies—those of Hollywood per se and the independently financed off-Hollywood productions that increasingly figure in its ranks—become more and more idiosyncratic, the Academy ages itself back into a cloistered senescence, with the glove on its fist of power wearing increasingly thin as, from year to year, it declares itself grotesquely ready for its annual closeup.

P.S.: I wondered whether the Academy had ever chosen as unlikely a host as MacFarlane; the Internet came to the rescue with this list of past hosts, stretching back to the start. (The first host I remember seeing live is Johnny Carson.) Amazingly, for three years (1968-1970), in keeping, I suppose, with the free-form tone of the times, there was no host—I wonder how the ceremonies unfolded. Much of the time, there were many hosts (simultaneous? successive?), and I’d imagine that the years when Jerry Lewis was on board (three times in the fifties), it must have been a regular riot—also with Jack Benny (twice in the forties). Yet sometimes it wasn’t comedians at all, but just fine actors (Paul Douglas, Robert Montgomery, Agnes Moorehead). And there’s one name on the list that I didn’t recognize at all—that of the host in March, 1938: Bob Burns. I looked him up: he was a comedian, born in 1890, who became famous for playing a musical instrument of his own invention, which he called the bazooka.

Photograph by Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty.

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